Searchable abstracts of presentations at key conferences in endocrinology
Endocrine Abstracts (2013) 32 S6.1 | DOI: 10.1530/endoabs.32.S6.1

ECE2013 Symposia What's new in type 2 diabetes? (3 abstracts)

The impact of our genomes on metabolic health

Torben Hansen


The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.


For the past two decades, genetics has been widely explored as a tool for unravelling the pathogenesis of cardio-metabolic disorders. Many risk alleles for type 2 diabetes and hyperglycaemia have been detected in recent years through massive genome-wide association studies and evidence exists that most of these variants influence pancreatic β-cell function. Investigations of more detailed physiological phenotypes, are now emerging and give indications of more specific pathological mechanism for diabetes-related risk variants. Such studies have shed light on the function of some loci but also underlined the complex nature of disease mechanism. In the future, sequencing-based discovery of low-frequency variants with higher impact on intermediate diabetes-related traits is a likely scenario and identification of new pathways involved in type 2 diabetes predisposition will offer opportunities for the development of novel therapeutic and preventative approaches. Furthermore, we recently described the Illumina-based metagenomic sequencing assembly and characterisation of 3.3 million non-redundant microbial genes from faecal samples of 124 European individuals. The extensive gene catalogue has enabled us to perform studies of association of the microbial genes with human metabolic phenotypes.

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